The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914 (review)

A mantra in European history is that the middle class is always rising. Middle Eastern historians now have their own mantra: The artisanal class is never disappearing. Until recently, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern historians have espoused the view that the integration of the third world into the world economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries spelled the end of independent third-world craftsmen and women and small-scale industrialists. Yet, anyone who has ever spent any time in the developing world and observed the vitality of small-scale crafts persons knows how inaccurate this view is. What social scientists now call the informal sector is alive and well. If your car needs repairs or you require home maintenance, mechanics, often possessing uncanny skills, instantaneously appear. And anyone who has dug into the social and economic records of third-world countries from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries surely is aware of the continuing size and dynamism of this earlier informal sector, populated at this time by sweaty and hard-working tailors, seamstresses, weavers, and hanson drivers. It would seem that the third-world informal sector has been around for a long time. It has a deep genealogy.

What makes Chalcraft's new book on Egypt's late nineteenth-century artisan class so exciting is not merely its treatment of Egyptian craftsmen and guilds in late nineteenth-century Egypt, although its excellence in this area is palpable. Far more important is its skillful handling of Egyptian archival materials. The Striking Cabbies of Cairo is one of the few books in English to make full use of the Egyptian National Archives, the Dar al-Watha'iq al-Qawmiyya, and thus to indicate that these records are now being made freely available to scholars.

The book has many virtues, only a few of which can be noted in a short review. Its primary theme, that craft groups and guilds did not shrink into nothingness when European manufactures arrived in Egyptian markets, like violets at the first blast of cold weather, has already made its way into Middle Eastern historiography, though mainly through the work of Ottoman historians. Chalcraft provides his readers with a nuanced view of the guilds and the guildsmen as they tried to keep the modernizing and increasingly powerful Egyptian state at bay and to move their economic activities out of areas in which European imports threatened to dominate the local market into areas where they had comparative advantages. For politically minded historians, who still tend to dominate this field, the later chapters on craft persons and the 'Urabi revolt and the nationalist movement are treasure troves of facts and generalizations. The author argues that the increasingly intrusive state had torn aside the protections that guild shaykhs provided to guild members and left the artisans face to face with government bureaucrats. Although this new arrangement exposed workers to heavy taxation, it also led the crafts persons to fashion new relations with the state. Working-class Egyptians, like their middle-class counterparts, began to establish citizenship ties to the state during the reign of Khedive Isma'il (1863–1879) and the 'Urabi revolt (1881–1882), only to see these promising constitutional innovations rudely interrupted by an autocratic colonial power.

Equally stimulating, though, in this case, much less well documented, is the connection of the urban artisans to the nationalist movement of the Egyptian National Party, led by Mustapha Kamil and Muhammad Farid. Historians have seen Egyptian anticolonial nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost entirely through the eyes of intellectuals and the middle class. There was, however, a working-class component, which Muhammad Farid is known to have cultivated. Chalcraft offers copious data on rank-and...